


Initiation

by TW Lewis (gardendoor)



Category: Highlander: The Series
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 1998-01-08
Updated: 1998-01-08
Packaged: 2017-10-29 05:00:34
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,793
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/316092
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gardendoor/pseuds/TW%20Lewis
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Whatever happened to Inspector LeBrun?</p>
            </blockquote>





	Initiation

**Author's Note:**

> Disclaimer: Rysher and friends own 'em, I'm just playing with 'em.

Inspector LeBrun took a long swig of his coffee. It was lukewarm and bitter, but there was no way he was going to leave the file in front of him to get more. For six years now he had been searching for information on Duncan MacLeod, an antique dealer who had been suspected in several beheading cases in the early nineties. The man was the most infuriating, obnoxious person LeBrun had ever encountered; he knew his rights backwards and forward and though he was guilty as sin, knew that there was no way to pin anything on him. Technicalities, the man was a master of making the technicalities work in his favor.

MacLeod had made a fool of him on several occasions, but more importantly he was a killer at large, endangering everyone he came into contact with. There was no way LeBrun was going to leave the case alone; he had to stop MacLeod. LeBrun was a good cop, he had never taken a bribe or done anything he later regretted. But he wanted to be more than a good cop, he wanted to be a great one. When he was a kid his heroes had been Sherlock Holmes and Eliot Ness. He had dreamed of being a detective and solving great crimes, bringing crafty villains to justice. Dreamed of being a hero the only way he knew how. MacLeod's case rankled, because there was no way to prove that any of the crimes happened around MacLeod were actually his fault. For the entire time he had been in Paris there had been shootings, suicides and, almost like clockwork, one decapitated body a week.

For the past six years, LeBrun had looked for any trace of a past criminal history for MacLeod. All he had been able to find were the beheadings in Paris and Vancouver and the unexplained deaths. Then he had a curious thought and expanded his horizons to Europe, where he found a whole rash of beheadings, ongoing killing sprees, all with different suspects that were never found guilty. But tonight, LeBrun had a breakthrough in deductive thought worthy of the great Holmes himself. Almost all those who were the victims of these killings had criminal records of their own, most of them including charges of beheadings. LeBrun wasn't looking at one man, he was looking at a whole secret society. If he could figure out the common threads, he could bring them all in.

Most of those who were suspects were eventually found beheaded themselves, which suggested that they might actually only be beheading each other. But that was counter-intuitive; why would anyone join a secret order that meant they would be murdered? But then it occurred to him that it could be two organizations, each supposed to kill all the other's members. That was the only way it made sense.

The list LeBrun had accumulated went back as long as there were police records in any country in the world. Though for a long time they had been few and far between, something was making them pick up the pace. As for the murderers and the victims, he could find no common gender, past associations, race, religion or creed. He did find that all of them had falsified birth certificates. None of them had medical records or high school diplomas, and for the most part professors at the colleges they claimed to have attended didn't remember any pupils matching those descriptions.

LeBrun took another swig from his cup only to find that it had been empty for a while. The page was more than a little blurry in front of his eyes, and he decided to call it a night. He went home and stripped for his shower, scrubbing off the grime of the day. Then he looked in the mirror for a moment. What had he let happen to him? He'd become obsessed, he had stopped caring as much about the day-to-day cases in homicide, and had focused everything on trying to bring in these crazed beheaders. Especially MacLeod. If he had seen another cop doing this, he'd be furious at the waste of a good officer on such a wild goose chase. What did he think this was, the X-files? Why was he running after occult criminals that no one else believed in?

He decided to talk to his chief, Dominy. Jean-Paul Dominy was a good man, he would help LeBrun get himself back together without holding this whole mess against him. But it would probably be best to do it in the morning, so LeBrun put aside the file for the night and went to sleep.

In the morning he went into the station and knocked on the chief's door.

"Come in," the voice on the other side ordered.

LeBrun entered the office and saw the overweight and solemn man looking over a few files on his desk, though he looked up to see who had come in. "Ah, what seems to be the problem, LeBrun?"

"Chief, I need your advice," he said, closing the door and sitting down. "I have something to confess. I've been working on one of the unsolved cases, and I think it may be interfering with my work."

The chief leaned forward. "Which case is that, LeBrun?" he asked.

"The MacLeod case six years ago, with the beheadings."

The chief leaned back in his chair. "Have you found out anything of value in the case, any leads?"

LeBrun shook his head. "I have, but if I tried to explain them you'd think I was crazy."

The chief shook his head. "LeBrun, you're a good, solid cop, I'm not going to throw a lead of yours out just because it's a little hard to believe, as long as you can back it up."

LeBrun nodded, taking out the file, spreading out newspaper articles, police reports, photos, birth and death certificates. "It's not just MacLeod. I've found at least a hundred people who were the victims of beheadings when he was in the area and had no alibi, both here and in Vancouver. But almost all of them either had a criminal record or were suspects in beheading cases of their own.

"All of them have falsified records; they take the names of babies who die young and make up the records they think are important, but they forget details like elementary and high school education, medical records. We're not looking at one individual, we're looking at a cult!"

The chief's lips tightened a little, and LeBrun felt his heart sink. "This is quite an impressive file," Dominy commented as he flipped through a few pages for a closer look. "But it's a rather unlikely accusation, saying that these people decided to join a cult so people would feel free to behead them."

LeBrun nodded. "I know. But I can't leave it alone, not with that maniac MacLeod out there killing people and getting away with it. I just can't work with this hanging over my head."  


  
Jean-Paul Dominy looked at the inspector and sighed heavily. He had been assigned to this position to keep an eye on LeBrun and lead him around in circles when MacLeod's Watcher had worried LeBrun was too smart for his own good, but Dominy hadn't seen a reason to waste a cop like LeBrun by making a fool of him and putting smoke screens in his way, and had simply piled on enough casework to keep LeBrun out of trouble. Apparently it had not been enough.

Dominy really didn't want to go through his superiors on this, he knew LeBrun far better than they did. He didn't want to fire LeBrun, the man might make more trouble as a free agent, but there wasn't much else he could do, unless he wanted LeBrun stumbling on the truth. From the evidence before him, it was apparent that LeBrun had everything figured out except the Immortality.

Dominy looked at LeBrun with a piercing gaze. "LeBrun, nothing said here is to leave this room, do you understand?"

LeBrun looked surprised, confused, but, "I understand."

Dominy turned around and unlocked a file drawer behind his desk, removing a file from the 'M' section. He rifled through it for a recent photograph, dropping it on the desk. "Do you recognize the face?"

"MacLeod," LeBrun replied darkly. "Of course I recognize him."

"Good. How about this one?" He handed LeBrun a copy of a Daguerreotype from the American civil war, which had a picture of ten medics standing in front of a tent.

LeBrun's eyes widened. "That's MacLeod! And next to him, Greg Powers, he's one of the men on my list of suspects!" He looked up. "It's got to be a trick."

"No trick. Here are more." He dropped the file on the desk carefully, so as not to scatter the papers that were already spread out. "MacLeod's file, going from 1492 to the present day."

"This is crazy." LeBrun's eyes were accusatory.

"There are more files, for more Immortals. They are all supposed to kill each other until only one is left. By beheading."

LeBrun shook his head. "This is impossible, but it makes everything fit into place." He looked up worriedly. "You are one of them? Are you going to kill me now?"

"No and no. I am a Watcher, we observe and record their lives without interfering. I was sent to keep an eye on you, make sure you didn't get into trouble. There is another Watcher in New York on similar duty for a Detective Moran, but Moran's not as much of a risk as you."

"How kind of you to nursemaid me," he replied sarcastically.

"It was necessary; some of these Immortals will kill to keep their secret safe. MacLeod is one of the more honorable ones, which is why you're still alive. But now that you know the truth, you can join us, if you like," Dominy offered.  


  
"Become a Watcher?" LeBrun asked, frowning. It was a strange recruiting process, and one he didn't like in the least. He didn't like the thought that his every move was manipulated by a team of observers who wanted to see how he performed. But on the other hand, it would mean that he would never be manipulated again, that in fact he would know things that even MacLeod would not know about what was going on. "No," he decided. "I'm a cop, I started this to help people, not to follow around criminals like an obsessive fan. Thank you for your help, Chief, but I have cases I need to get back to." He left his file on the desk next to the scattered photographs and walked out with a slight spring in his step.

End.


End file.
